Are your appliances draining your budget?

You rely on your appliances to make your life easier- whether it is for storing and preparing food, or cleaning up afterwards (dishes and laundry) but did you know that your decisions around appliance use can really add up (or subtract) from your energy bills?  Appliance use generally makes up 15 percent or so of your energy bill. If you haven’t already, consider the following:

 

Cool it with the fridges

It’s super convenient to have an extra fridge in the basement or garage or wherever to store your extra food (especially if you stock up at the grocery store or are hosting a party).

However, using that old fridge or freezer is seriously sucking money out of your wallet. Most older model fridges and freezers are not energy efficient. So not only are you paying extra money to run these extra appliances that you may or may not really need, you are paying even more because they are not efficiently built.

Watch the clock

Depending on where you live, it costs significantly more to run an appliance during the day at certain times over others. This is when you can really be time-efficient. For instance, throw a load of laundry in when you get up (i.e. prior to 7am) while you are getting ready. It will be ready to fold when you get home!

Use the delay start on your dishwasher. Energy is cheapest in the middle of the night.

Be sensitive

Are you setting your dryer on a timer, or utilizing the sensor? You may be running that load far longer then you need to.

Always use the dryer sensor so that the load is done when it is dry (and not 10 expensive minutes later).

Unplug it

We tend to leave all of our appliances plugged in all the time. In an average household, that’s a lot? Obviously, it’s not feasible to unplug many of the larger appliances when you’re not using them, but take a look at some of the small appliances and electronics (i.e. coffeemakers and computers).

Turn them off or unplug them. Every little bit of energy savings helps!